Friday, May 3, 2013

PROJECT: BEATMAKING APP

As hip-hop and electronic music have developed into global
culture, there is a growing need for resources, education and software to help
youth express themselves in these genres. The
Beat Making Lab was started by Music Producer Stephen Levitin and musician Pierce
Freelon at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to foster music creation
in communities internationally. It is an electronic music studio which teaches
music composition using Laptops. By doing this, the lab aims to eliminate
expensive Music Production equipment and give everyone the opportunity to make
beats.

The Beat Making App aims to take this idea further. A kit
for beat making using Laptops currently costs around $1500. Moreover, the
laptop doesn’t have unbounded portability. By facilitating beat making on
Mobile devices, the student of the lab has access to the beat making facilities
everywhere, anytime and would complement the training given on Laptops.

Our beat making app enables users to create Electronic Music
on their Android devices.The user can
compose a Track made up of up to 4 Patterns using the “Tracks” screen which
allows the user to add/remove patterns to/from the Track.

The Patterns can be recorded using the Drum Machine. A Drum
Machine is a 4x4 Grid of cells (Pads) each of which represents a Sound Sample. The
Drum machine has a default set of assigned sounds and new sounds can be
assigned to the pads via the edit drum machine screen. During a pattern's
playback, a metronome sound will play to help the user keep track of the beats
per minute. The pattern will continue looping until the stop button is pressed.
During playback the user may play beats by touching one of the 16 pads on the
screen. The beat gets recorded and added to the pattern only if the record
button is pressed. The recorded beat will then be included in the playback.
Pads will be lit up as the corresponding sounds are played during playback.

We took special care to make the User Interface intuitive and
responsive without compromising on the features. This will enable the student
to focus on learning how to compose beats rather than trying to learn the
technicalities of our App.

We are thankful to Professor Benjamin Watson, our clients and
Mobi-Class(Spring’13) students for their valuable feedback on it. We welcome
you to explore the resources we have created here and contribute to the Open Source beat
making community.

1 comment:

I really liked your project video. The app looks really robust and well made. The beat you made while flying through actually sounded pretty cool, even though it didn't seem like you put much thought into it. That makes me think that someone putting real time into your app will be able to make some great beats. Good job!